Tuesday, February 27, 2018
Crisis Actors And The Gateway Pundit Smell Test
WaPo | The bloodshed had barely ended in Parkland, Fla., last week when the Gateway Pundit added its own unique take on the students who had quickly become media-friendly gun-control advocates.
“EXPOSED,” read its headline.
“School Shooting Survivor Turned Activist David Hogg’s Father in FBI,
Appears To Have Been Coached On Anti-Trump Lines.” It later doubled
down, asserting — without any evidence to support it — that operatives
linked to liberal billionaire George Soros had “selected anti-Trump kids to be the face” of the massacre.
The stories helped spread a debunked conspiracy theory about the
students being paid “crisis actors.” This was a few days after the site
initially claimed that the suspected shooter was “a registered Democrat.” A few hours later, it realized it had zeroed in on the wrong Nikolas Cruz but soft-pedaled its correction, merely amending its story to say he wasn’t a Democrat, as “some sources had reported” — a group that seemed to include news sites that had cited Gateway Pundit’s story.
Gateway
Pundit didn’t stop there. Reporter Lucian Wintrich, who wrote the
Parkland stories, took to Twitter to denounce the protesting students as
“little pricks.”
The
take-no-prisoners approach — not to mention the conspiratorial tone and
dubious assertions — has been the trademark of Gateway Pundit since its
founding by a former corporate executive named Jim Hoft in 2004.
Despite this, its influence has grown both among the fringe right and
more mainstream conservatives. In 2016, it championed Donald Trump’s
candidacy; Wintrich eventually received White House press credentials in
the new Trump administration.
Hoft — who declined an in-person
interview and only responded briefly to questions via email — rejected
the label often applied to his creation: far right. The term, he said,
is “used by Democrats and far left media to smear anyone who opposes the
leftist narrative.”
By
CNu
at
February 27, 2018
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Labels: civil war , identity politics , narrative , professional and managerial frauds , propaganda
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